5. Elyse
ELYSE
The radio says morning, and that’s the problem.
Not the storm. Not the cold. The morning, ticking toward us out there in the white. When it comes, the plow breaks the pass open and we drive down the mountain and back into the world, where he’s a man who doesn’t winter the same place twice and I’m the woman who holds the desk he’ll leave from.
I’m warm against his side, and I’ve never felt anything like it in my life.
That’s exactly why the fear has teeth now.
I let him matter. I did the one thing I swore I’d never do again, and by the time it’s light, the road’s going to open, and he’s going to remember he has a truck in a lower lot and a season half booked and somewhere else to be by the time the lifts spin.
Better to be the one who says it first. I’ve been left in the dark before. I know how it goes when you don’t see it coming. I don’t intend to be surprised twice.
“So this was the storm,” I say.
I feel him go still under my cheek. “What?”
“This.” I sit up, pulling the jacket with me, putting air where there wasn’t any. “Two people stuck in a rig with nothing to do and a lot of adrenaline. It happens. It doesn’t have to mean anything past tonight. You don’t have to do the part where you pretend it does.”
He comes up on one elbow. In the dash light, I can’t read his face. I make myself keep going before he speaks.
“You leave, Cash. It’s the truest thing about you.
You told me so yourself.” My voice threatens to give on the last word, and I flatten it.
“You’re gone before the lifts spin. That’s not an insult, it’s just what’s real.
So let’s not make it a whole thing. The pass opens, you go get your truck, and I return to my desk.
Nobody has to wake up tomorrow feeling stupid. ”
“You’re doing it right now,” he says quietly. “The thing you told me about. You’re leaving before I can.”
“I’m being realistic.”
“You’re putting up your wall.” He sits up the rest of the way.
“You met somebody who does the exact thing you do, and the second it got warm in here, you reached for the one move that puts you back behind the desk. Say it was the storm, and I’m easy to let go.
Send me down the mountain like every other guy you’ve ever dispatched. ”
I don’t have an answer for that, because it’s true, and being seen straight through is worse than being left.
Out past the glass, the storm’s finally thinning. The snow’s gone fine and slow, but the pass is still buried and the plow’s hours off, and there’s nowhere for either of us to go.
Nothing to do but wait out the dark on my own side of it, and let the morning open the road and prove me right.
“You should get some sleep,” I say.